Sitting in a small sushi bar near his home in the Duboce Triangle, former Stanford Stegner Fellow Matthew Siegel said last week that he started sending out poems at a young age, that he submitted to “every single decent magazine in Poet’s Market” and “literally papered a wall with rejection slips.”

“I would come home and go out to get the mail and think, 'Who’s rejected me today?’” he said. “But it wasn’t like 'who’s rejecting me?’ — it’s like I’m participating in this thing that actually has nothing to do with things getting taken, but just like throwing coins in the water.”

That attitude has carried Siegel a long way. Nearing completion of his master’s at the University of Houston, he applied for the Stegner “because that’s what you’re supposed to do,” he said. “I didn’t tell anyone I applied. I didn’t ever think it was remotely possible.”

Siegel’s debut collection of poems, “Blood Work,” which won the University of Wisconsin Press Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, comes out next month.

“I was able to develop what I was doing more, and it sort of raised the bar a little bit in terms of what I expected from myself,” he said of the fellowship. “And in terms of just thinking about the role of poetry in my day-to-day life, and not just as something that I do. Something that I’m trying to embody somehow. So to have time to do that was really special.

“You produce poems like a tree produces fruit, or something. It’s just something that you do. And sometimes the fruit is good, and sometimes the fruit is not good. But you can improve the pruning, so increase the chances of it being good by reading certain things and by thinking about poems in certain ways, and really loving it,” said Siegel, who reads Friday with two other poets celebrating the release of their debut collections.

That love allowed him “to be brutal” with the manuscript, which he said ended up very different from the version he started with. In 2012, “Blood Work” was a first runner-up for the Kent State poetry prize.

“I thank my lucky stars that they didn’t take that book,” he said. “I mean, it’s a great prize — I would have been thrilled to win it — but the book wasn’t ready. And it’s so much better now.”